"I never forget a face, but in your case, I'll make an exception."

Let's try something. Let's try forgetting everything we ever knew about basketball. Let's... look, you saw The Matrix, right? But "the Matrix" is replaced with "your present conception of basketball". Free your mind. Ain't no such things as halfway crooks. Go all the way. Forget everything. Okay, take a deep breath. If you've done it right, it's all gone. Everything's forgotten about the game. "Basketball" now looks like a curious misspelling of "baseball".

That's how fully I've bought into this hypothetical.

The first thing we find in our quest to discover the meaning of "Basketball" is a bunch of random box scores sprawling across the Internet, and an unaccountable sense that these things form a self-consistent system to try to understand. We all individually forgot, but the Internet remembered! ... But not enough to tell us the rules of basketball. (This is already getting really convoluted. Bear with me, okay?) We're all alone in the universe, and nothing can change that. Except for this hypothetical we've decided to undertake, together. Come a little closer and we can discuss the implications of this hypothetical further. It's cold outside, after all. Put on the samovar, Natascha.

• • •

Anyway. We run some mad regressions on the box scores we find. Some happy ones too, but mostly the seething ones. We notice a lot of stuff going on, a lot of equations that are always satisfied. Ignorant of the structure of the game, we form a hypothesis from these box scores: basketball is a self-consistent system perfectly derivable from the box scores, and this self-consistent system explains why every team wins or loses and to what extent. Categorically. Whatever the case, Implication #1 of the "Perfectly Derivable From The Box Score Theory" is the idea that if you take away any one number from a box score, you ought to be able to derive it precisely from every other number on the sheet. If one player's point totals are missing from every game, filling those numbers in simply a matter of adding up the first three numbers in the three dashed columns (FG, 3P, FT). If a player's field goals are missing? We take their point total, and from their point total, we subtract their 3P and FT. These are equations that are exactly accounted for in nearly every box score. Exceptions in these equations (we correctly reason) are mistakes in recording, not of mistakes in the system itself. And we're cool with that. Every point is accounted for.

But points are pretty easy to account for given only the box score. What about the rest? Well, we form more sophisticated theories to explain the relation between the other 11 pieces of information associated with every player, and eventually, after a few years, we put it all together in something akin to Newton's Laws of Motion or the inverse square law of gravity. We design the Possession Model, humanity's best attempt to make sense of the alien laws of "basketball." Every shot is a resource expended, made or missed. Every turnover is a resource expended. Every rebound is a resource gained. Every steal is a resource gained. Every set of free throws not as a part of an and-one is a resource expended. In all cases, the resource is the same. It's called a possession, and -- other than blocks, assists, and fouls -- our box scores are almost completely devoted to encoding this type of resource: how many of these a team gets, how efficiently it uses them to score points, how it loses them.

Our only disagreements here aren't all that fundamental. Just as we basically agree that something thrown upwards must come downward in a parabolic arc, we agree on the Possession Model of Basketball. Our disagreements boil down to a few lingering questions. First, how much is each of the resources is "worth"? Second, how do we credit the resources to the individual players that accrue the statistics? After all, certain things like rebounds and missed shots seem pretty commonplace, while steals and turnovers are comparatively rare. Maybe we can figure something out with that, you know? Those probably don't work out to the same value in an actual game, right? Or maybe they do. I don't know. Neither do you. None of us has ever seen a game of basketball, because we're forgetting! That's the whole point of this exercise, darn it!

Different researchers come to different conclusions with each of these questions, but overall, the consensus we share is more powerful than the minor points of disagreement. We go to the moon with this model by the end of the first decade of forgetting basketball, to keep up with the Newton analogy. We explain so much of what goes on with this model that we feel that we understand the box scores on a deep level, even if only as a self-consistent system. So we're all pretty satisfied we would be all major league at basketball if we knew what the heck it was. But for all our hilariously misplaced hubris, we still have doubts. We're only human, after all. We still ask ourselves about the little questions, the unknowns about this system we've found. Why are the two final scores never exactly equal? Haven't these people heard of ties?

Also, there's the giant elephant in the room. What on Earth is an assist?

• • •

Assists appear to be the only facet of the box score that "doesn't fit the plan" of a perfectly self-consistent game. Blocks and fouls are important but somewhat rare, they mostly seem like a less meaningful version of a steal and a negative statistic associated with opponent free throws, respectively. Yet, all we have are correlations: sometimes assists seem more like the concentrated pulp of a dying tree's fruits than the sweet pulp of a flourishing system, not entirely negative but not a panacea either. So we're left with a question and it's not clear where to begin answering it. How do we explain assists?

Spoiler alert! We can't.

With mystical explanations we can scrap together a narrative, but when you're dealing with science you can't take that much on faith alone. So we gather what we know about the fabled statistic. They're pretty consistent between players, teams, and what assists do for a win. Even if we don't know quite what they denote. Assuming basketball is a perfectly self-consistent system described by the box score, we try all sorts of mathematical models on the box score, but we come up short. In want of more data, we come to a lot of intriguing alternative hypotheses to explain assists.

• Hypothesis #1: Assists are essentially random events in the economy of a basketball game that can favorably occur to each team that Make Everyone Better in a mystical sense. Rather like the weather and climate, we can project and explain how assists happen in a large-scale sense even if chance prohibits us from going much further. Some teams are great at having fortune smile upon them or, equivalently, at having fortune frown upon their opponents. We assume that point guards are rather akin to clerics or scientists or strategists, tipping the balance of fortune in their team's favor, because it's the only reason they seem to be in the game on their own merits. The best leaders and priests and scientists are inordinately valuable to their teams. Is this the role of the point guard? And this explanation certainly jibes with our intuition, even if it doesn't have any empirical strength. It's a cool idea and it catches on. Everyone is happy someone thought of Hypothesis #1, even if it does feel like sort of a holdover/straw man while someone figures out something better.

• Hypothesis #2: We go the pure mathematical route: There are approximately 20-24 players in each game and each of them can have a number of assists. This gives us a point in 24-dimensional phase space, called "assisted space". It is thought that basketball is very simple on the lonely whole and very complicated on the margins of assisted space. We believe that this point in assisted space explains the remaining difference between the computed score (from all other stats) and actual score. Unfortunately, inferring a function with 24-dimensional domain is essentially impossible and this line of inquiry leads nowhere except to some neat graphics. Of course, neat graphics form 80% of the economy of the Internet and Hypothesis #2 is named Time's Person of the Year in a gimmick. In a tidbit sidebar the "net worth" of this Hypothesis is estimated at $600 billion.

• Hypothesis #3: We presume basketball is a system of inordinate complexity. As the focus moves from the possession to the assist, we note in our box scores that assists aren't simply correlative magnets for efficiency, but almost certainly have something to do with field goals and turnovers. If the possession is a resource, then the assist appears to be a secondary resource. It's further noted that just as defensive rebounds have to do with the other team's shots, assists have to do with one's teammates' shots. As a self-consistent system, assists are seen as the cooperative counterpart to turnovers, which sacrifice resources to the other team. Assists sacrifice one's own shots attempts for those of the other players, likely because the synergy of those players is the most efficient use of possessions.

Hypothesis #3 eventually takes over the academic community. This is not because it fits the evidence best, no. Too easy. This is because, after a long protracted debate over the meaning of the assist, hockey goes into a lockout and some random dude that watches hockey is sitting at home and is asked by a scholar of the mythical game of "basketball" what an "assist" means, as though it's some cryptic, unfathomable divination. After twenty-five minutes of a discussion held with that particular ironic relish of the French-Canadian accent, our hockey friend tells us everything about the nature of an assist. We understand, now.

Yet, even though humanity long abandoned Hypotheses #1 and #2, we can't let go of the mystical assist-givers as the grandmasters or prophets of basketball, accounting for all the complexity. Everything eventually falls into place for our conception of basketball. But in the back of our minds, point guards are elevated to the paragons of the sport, and the possession model is seen not as fundamental construct but as a holdover to the glorious exaltation of the prodigious assist-givers. And the other stats, in their self-consistency, now don't seem important so much as relatively preordained and fixed, as a perfunctory stage in which the assist-givers can thrive in their personal versions of chaotic fluidity and complexity. We run fascinated regressions on each assist-giver attempting to valuate the good and the bad. We understand, now.

• • •

Come to think of it, the word means "assist." That seems pretty obvious in retrospect. But then again, we're the people that spent an entire afternoon pretending to forget a sport we love because some idiot on a blog told us to. But let's be real: it was all a fever-dream and you forgot nothing about anything. No one did. Not even me. We all decided to pretend to forget basketball just to be polite to my absurd fascinations, and I thank you for it, but the experiment was an utter failure and during everything I described you still envisioned it all in terms of the basketball you've known and will continue to know. I asked the impossible of you and I'm frankly disappointed that you couldn't deliver. My faith in all of us is shook.

Look, I'm sorry.

But it kind of made you think, didn't it? Those assists, oh man, we went crazy with those assists. And you could probably buy all of that, right? If we didn't know what assists were, we'd have to account for them somehow, and they're the only things that aren't almost perfectly accounted for in the box score, at least in stats that actually "seem" to matter. And they do matter: we know assists matter a lot, and anyone that watches basketball or does any kind of regression knows that assists matter a great deal. Still, we shouldn't fetishize them like the people in that example. There's nothing mystical about a drive-and-kick. There's nothing mystical about good basketball, on the whole (even if there is something awesome about a great point guard that evokes a mystic). No, nothing fancy: work-a-day assists are just one part of the Big Picture Fundamentals, and that's all there is to it. We understand, now.

On the other hand, for all our sophistication in box score stats, most of them boil down to: "possession model" + "assists are generally positive" = "good players care about possessions, using them correctly, and racking up assists". And that's something worth noting. Because I'd argue that not many people actually approach the game that way, and while it's a neat "self-consistency + context" construct, it's also not intuitive and arguably not rational, either. I calculate the number of possessions and the players' individual points per possession when I look at the box score, to be honest, just because I'm a math guy and it's very easy for me to add field goal attempts and turnovers and half of free throws attempted and subtract offensive rebounds. Then I take the secondary/tertiary stats as "context". But I never really buy that as a good description. It just doesn't work for me. I know on some level that this approach is flawed, that it's priming me the wrong way, and that it gives a false linear narrative to something holistic and multifaceted. "Oh, he was inefficient at shooting, but he got a lot of steals and blocks and assists" is often a valid thing to say, but when the second part of your sentence can completely deconstruct the first part of your sentence? That's fundamentally flawed.

"Oh, Chris Paul got 20 points on 20 shots, that's kinda trash. Also he got 18 assists and 7 rebounds and 6 steals. I guess he's not such a trashy offensive player after all." I shouldn't prime myself that way, and I shouldn't have to engage in complicated mental arithmetic or random, non-intuitive single-number stats just to have a basic idea of what statistically a player is contributing. There's no baseline, there are a few stats columns jutting out arbitrarily, and overall, there's not a solid picture of what's going on. Just because assists don't fit the Possession Model doesn't mean they have anything mystical or tacked-on to them, or anything particular that separates them out from any other statistic. They just fit a self-consistent model less easily. There's nothing wrong with that. It just makes it hard for human beings to contextualize them correctly. There's nothing special about at-rim shots or threes, other than that teams generating these shots more often than their opponents will tend to win more games. Basketball is not unfathomably complex as a game, but sometimes it seems that way between the hodgepodge of different sites with analytics on the one hand and the fluidity and gospel truth of what one sees on the other. So let's get back to basics somehow.

So maybe that's the first alternative reality that is actually worth noting here. It's worth trying to blend analytics and what we see in a much more fluid way. The visual candor of the game can fool, but it's a powerful tool when you apply the proper rigor. We're people that are convinced by the eyes and the numbers, but the truth lies not in disjoint fragments but in a simultaneous picture containing both.

And instead of going all-out in the other direction from the Possession Model (which is very powerful, intuitive, and explanatory on a team level), perhaps we could build a set of assist-and-shot-location-heavy stats into the default box score that would accommodate the Quarterback Model for understanding basketball as an alternative. The Quarterback Model, akin to Hypothesis #3, could sit as a sort of brother theory to the Possession Model, with equal standing but with slightly different perspective. To explain what I mean: If the key axiom underlying the Possession Model is to maximize the value of possessions while minimizing the value of opponent possessions, the key axiom of the Quarterback Model is that the key skill for players is to generate efficient shot attempts for themselves and their teammates (and stop the generation of those efficient shot attempts for their opponents).

There are some fundamental problems with recording assists: For example, there aren't any non-examples, it's not a stat you can just not rack up, or rack up negative examples by feeding teammates in the wrong spots and making them miss with bad passes. To have weak assist stats right now doesn't mean to fail an efficiency test, it means quite literally to have fewer assists, pace/teammate/schedule-adjustments notwithstanding. But getting location-specific data for the assists (and for players' own shots) could help us go beyond the nebulous cliches. It's worth noting that in fact, to a lot of folks, that is the default version of basketball, not because they're ignorant of the Possession Model but because they find it less satisfactory or aesthetic or explanatory.

• • •

This is a conclusion, because pieces are supposed to have conclusions. We went on a journey into an alternate reality, came back, talked about what we learned, and box scores should be better and reflect assists less as a stat-padding extra that kinda doesn't fit but we all know is good and more as a part of holistic model of how teams generate shot attempts efficiently. That's it. That's my thesis, in short, and, in the grand tradition of conclusions we're now supposed to go more general and end with a sort of open literary ending. You know, much like the end of a conversation with friends is filled with well-wishing and deliberately constructed loose ends to signal, above all else, that that was a good conversation, that it was meaningful, and that (some time in the future) we should continue some of these loose ends in future conversations and keep one another in our minds in the meantime. Because... people, man. That's what's important in life, not getting the statistics exactly right for a simple game.

A game whose name escapes me right now. A curious misspelling of baseball, right?

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“Fool that I am, that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself.”

Yesterday afternoon, we were treated to some unexpected league-changing news. From the mouth of Adrian Wojnarowski himself, word filtered down that the Brothers Maloof had finalized a deal to sell the Sacramento Kings to a Seattle-led ownership group. Most response involved some manner of shock, jubilation, and confusion. After all, it was just earlier this week that the Maloofs' Virginia Beach flirtation ended -- nobody expected them to bite on a new deal so quickly after that fell through. Jubilation is obvious -- the sad tale of the wayward Sonics is one that just about every NBA fan has been fed ad nauseam over the past several years, and the prospect of a revitalized Sonics is neat. And confusion? Again: where did it come from? Where was the lead up?

There are a lot of different considerations that bear mention when news of this magnitude shocks us. How are divisions going to realign to fit the new Sonics? How done is done -- will the Maloofs really follow through on it, or is this going to be yet another in their string of failed business decisions? And what kind of a trade is it to give up a franchise with a promising young core for a franchise that desperately needs a housecleaning? These will be answered in time, along with questions we haven't even thought to ask yet. And they may renege, it's true -- we aren't exactly talking about George W. Bush, here. No deciders. The Maloofs are notorious for their waffling, and we're already starting to see signs that this may just be their latest cowardly attempt to siphon more money from Sacramento's ownership groups.

But there was a curious lack of focus on what was actually getting left behind. Lots of thought about the future, the villains, et cetera -- almost no talk of what was to be lost. Today, I'd like to go over that history a bit. Let's remember the Sacramento Kings, and why they mattered.

• • •

Here's a fact that most people either aren't aware of or don't seem to care about -- the Kings have been around longer than almost every franchise in the league. Really! When the BAA disbanded and the NBA was formed in 1950, there were 17 teams that stuck around or were established to make the league. The Kings were a late addition to the BAA, and by extension, one of those founding NBA teams. Not all of those 17 teams stuck around, either. (Sorry, Sheboygan Red Skins!)

Of the 17 founding NBA teams, here are the eight that remain:

• Atlanta Hawks (then the Tri-City Blackhawks)
• Boston Celtics
• Detroit Pistons (then the Fort Wayne Pistons)
• Golden State Warriors (then the Philadelphia Warriors)
• Los Angeles Lakers (then the Minneapolis Lakers)
• New York Knicks
• Philadelphia 76ers (then the Syracuse Nationals)
• ... and finally, the Sacramento Kings (then the Rochester Royals)

They've been around a while. The Royals, in fact, were a very good team at the NBA's inception -- they tied Mikan's Lakers for the best record in the league in the NBA's founding season, and they won the 2nd NBA title ever awarded in 1952 -- they won it in an amusingly stressful fashion, too, beating the Knicks 4-3 in a series they shot out to a 3-0 lead in. That's right, they let the Knicks win three straight. "NOTHING EASY, WE GOING TO GAME 7 BABY." Assuming the sale goes through, that was the last time the Kings would make the finals. In a bit of sick irony, this means the to-be-defunct Kings would forever hold a tie for the best winning percentage in franchise NBA finals appearances -- after all, they made one and won one, so that's 100%! That ties the Jordan Bulls (6-0) and the Duncan Spurs (4-0). Good work, Kings.

I'm not 100% convinced I'm going to be able to give you a fair lowdown, at least on the Kings' early years. They moved to Cincinnati in 1957. Given that I'm 22 years old, I... uh... wasn't really around for the Royals' days in Cincinnati. To put it lightly. Hell, my parents weren't really around for the Royals' days in Cincinnati! I'm not positive that Curtis Harris was either, but he has written a lot of wonderful work remembering the players and personalities that team starred. There was Jack Twyman, as influential for his work bringing better labor conditions to the NBA as he was for being one of the best scoring forwards in league history. There was Oscar Robertson's triple-double season, a feat almost as untouchable as Rasheed's 41 technical season. There was Maurice Stokes, the first black superstar. Lots of colorful figures, lots of notable history. All worth reading. Check out his archives at Hardwood Paroxysm for a bit of a history lesson. Might be surprised at the depth, here.

When people refer to the Kings' general lack of history, they tend to point out that the Kings of recent years have been startlingly devoid of notoriety. Which is true in a broad sense. They only made the playoffs five of their thirteen years in Kansas City, despite Nate Archibald and their other stars. Although it is worth mentioning that one of those five runs was a shocking run to the Western Conference Finals against a Moses Malone-led Rockets team. I'm 90% sure that ranked as the first and only time in NBA history that two teams with losing records played in a conference finals matchup. Fun facts abound! The playoff drought got worse after their conference finals appearance and extended their plight when they finally made their way from Kansas City to Sacramento in 1986, too -- the Kings made the playoffs their first year and proceeded to miss the boat nine years in a row, and if you're counting, the Kings didn't have a single playoff victory from 1982 to 1996.

That could have been the end, but it wasn't -- the Kings finally started to acquire some upwards momentum in the late 90s, and in 1999 under Rick Adelman they managed to post their first winning record in 16 years. This set off one of the most successful periods in the Kings' history, an eight year period where the Kings would win 63% of their games, make the playoffs every single year, and win five individual playoff series. They played a breakneck offensive game, with Adelman scheming around Chris Webber's transcendent brilliance, Peja Stojakovic's shooting wizardry, and Vlade Divac's... everything, really. The early-aughts Kings were one of the most interesting basketball teams to ever play the game, taking the court with a strangely refreshing streetball mentality. They'd taunt, challenge, and flash to their heart's content. They passed the ball beautifully, shot the ball brilliantly, and won the hearts of millions. Their ill-begotten loss to the Lakers in the 2002 season can only be forgiven by the essential fact that it also meant Mike Bibby didn't win a title. (Sorry. I can appreciate the Kings all I want, but I still hate Mike Bibby with the inexplicable fury of a thousand suns.)

Since then, the Kings have been bad. Really bad. Although it's worth noting that this isn't entirely unplanned. The Maloofs haven't put serious money or investment into making the Kings a quality team since the mid 2000s, and they've been trying to move the franchise for the past 3 or 4 years. It's insane that this needs to be given as a caveat, but it absolutely needs to -- the Kings have made abhorrent personnel moves over the past few years, and they've composed a team with absolutely no cohesion or ability to compete on a real NBA level. And it hasn't been for no reason. If you lose the fans on purpose and price them out of their seats, you can build a real narrative about Sacramento "abandoning" the team. It hasn't. The Maloofs have poisoned the water in an effort to build a story, and while many accept the story on its face, it's difficult to really blame Kings fans for getting frustrated and dismayed with an ownership group that's tried their hardest to undermine every iota of respect and love Sacramento gives their team. Impossible, for me.

• • •

One of the first "serious" books I ever read was The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic Dumas masterpiece on revenge and the toll it takes on a man's soul. I don't need to explicitly restate the story -- even if you haven't read it, it's an outline that everyone's familiar with. Man is unjustly imprisoned, man stews over his rage for years, man breaks free, man extracts a long revenge on those who wronged him, and finally... man loses sight of his humanity in his quest for vengeance and becomes, to the reader and his eldest kin, an unrecognizable phantasm of woe and misery. The whole point of the book, in a not-so-roundabout way, is to highlight the problems with revenge as a concept. It's all fun and games to think about revenge. Actually acting on it changes a man, and can fundamentally betray the soul of the person who was wronged in the first place.

Wrongs aren't forgiven simply because you suffered before you acted on them. They're still wrong.

And that's, I suppose, my big problem with the move. Or at least at some of the joy many people get from it. Seattle is a wonderful city. I'll be there twice this year for two beautiful weddings. I felt for Seattle when they lost their Sonics, and I understand the desire for a team trumps the desire for justice. But this post is, in some sense, the big problem with moving a franchise to Seattle -- if you bring back the Sonics, you're necessarily closing the book on another team's history. The Kings have been around in some form or another for over 60 years. That's an awfully long stretch of time to simply close the book. If the Kings were moving to Anaheim, or Virginia Beach, or Las Vegas... they'd still be the Kings, or some warped interpretation thereof. They wouldn't simply be erasing their soul to become an echo of a dearly departed Seattle franchise.

Why does it matter? After all, as some Sonics fans were apt to point out, "Kings fans don't care." But that's... really not correct, at all. For all the whinging about Sacramento's poor attendance numbers, it's been lost in the shuffle that the Sonics had virtually identical numbers in the season before the move -- while the Kings have been filling the Sleep Train Arena to 76% capacity this season, the Sonics filled Key Arena to 78% capacity before the shoe dropped and Bennett moved them out. For all the talk about Seattle's storied basketball history, it's been lost that the Kings are also a storied basketball franchise -- erasing the league footprint of one of the NBA's founding franchises should not come lightly, nor should it come without a healthy dollop of respect. I think Seattle is due a franchise as much as anyone, but short of moving the Thunder back, I'm not sure of any non-expansion way to get them one.

Moving franchises where the owners have poisoned the well and ruined their fan experience just to make their team more mobile is the Count of Monte Cristo approach to team-building. Much like the masterpiece, the problem isn't in Seattle regaining a franchise, or in the reestablishment of a proud mainstay of the NBA's culture. No more than the problem was the Count's revenge in the first place. It's the collateral damage. It's the wives and families of the men who wronged the Count, or the history we're obliterating to reestablish the Seattle mainstay. It's the Sacramento arena-workers who lose their jobs with no prospect of ever getting a professional sports franchise ever again. It's the fans who did absolutely nothing wrong and are suffering for the sins of their horrible wayward owners. Seattle may need a franchise. Does the city need one enough to extract its vengeance on a set of innocent fans? Does the city need one enough to commit the very sin they eviscerated Bennett for, in the name of big market exceptionalism? Do the fans need one enough to consider themselves more deserving than the luckless Kings fans?

Who knows, really?

For now, questions of Seattle's worth aren't nearly as important as appreciating what we have in the Kings, and appreciating what the franchise means before the Maloofs do their best to wash it away. Try to remember the Kings, and sift through records of their obscenely deep history. If the Maloofs have their way, one won't be able to appreciate it much longer.

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One pet peeve I have when discussing basketball is when people don't treat the game like the game that it is. I don't mean people that take it too seriously. I mean people that completely ignore the role of competition and the act of competing in a game of opposing players and teams with both fitting and clashing intentions. After all, it's this continuous collection of games-within-the-game that compels nearly every rational decision made in the games. The fact that basketball is a highly symmetric game with two teams, a finite amount of time, and definite outcomes (win or loss) seems to me about the first or second fact implicit in any discussion. All too often, we lose that thread in the hodgepodge of personalities, mental feats, and the impressive physical execution. It's a game, though! You have to play the game to win the game. And that game isn't "Can I get my buckets?" or "Can I fit the template of your designated Right Way, focusing on grit and hustle?" It's a game, and the game is basketball.

Enter Kobe. Segue, Denver. That intro comes about because of this strange Laker season in which everyone has mentally diagnosed an unsolvable problem with the Lakers, solved another one, and caused several new problems with short-sighted solutions. The "hypotheticals" game-within-the-game is a whole lot of fun, but as designated practitioner of the Right Way, it's probably time for all the fun to end. No more narratives for me, folks. Simple living, easy thoughts. Kobe has such a unique footprint on any game he's a part of, one that has grown ever more stark and dichotomous through all the recent roster turnover (forced and unforced). And yet, we get bogged down in all the ephemera to try to figure out what the heck that footprint actually is, because Kobe has set us up to think in terms of "Are you, or are you not, a winner?" And there are so many questions, in this world of winners.

• Is Kobe actually having an MVP-caliber season?
• Is Steve Nash a pale ghost of his old self this season that can't guard paper with glue or is he just as brilliant as ever?
• Is Kobe actually a huge minus defender now?
• If he is... is it even possible to build a contender around him, no matter how good he might be on one end?
• _Is Dwight Howard ever going to be the top center in the league again?___

All of these are interesting questions, to a point. But I've reached it. Me, I simply can't find them interesting anymore.

• • •

We always hear about the teams that can't win a title because of some arbitrary reason, like those questions on the list. Lo and behold, one of those teams does. Every year! Remember when Dirk couldn't, until he could? Remember when LeBron couldn't, until he could? Remember when Kobe couldn't win without Shaq, until he could? Remember when Jordan couldn't, until he could? Games aren't won by the best team, they're won by the team that put itself in a position to win and got enough of the right breaks.

The better team simply tend to be on the lucky side of the coin, and teams that are comfortable being good have the most tricks available to keep themselves on that side of the ledger. It's not a categorical game. There's chance, and variables you can't know in advance. With the Lakers, all we have are their footprints on the games. Instead of looking at the shapes and figuring out what weight that contender has, what transcendence that offense is capable of, what depths that transition defense can sink to? We focus on Dwight's mentality and Kobe's chemistry. Nash's "age" and Pau's softness. Because we have an idea of what a contender looks like, we fall on well-trodden arithmetic and see if that arithmetic fits our archetype for a contender. "Is their Pythagorean age too old?" ... "Does a championship team have a player like Jodie Meeks or Jordan Hill at 6th on the depth chart?" ... "How will the Lakers shore up their bench?"

If we want to find answers to the Lakers' curious plight, we need to treat the game like the game it is. Not a scoring parlor (for the offensively-fixated) or a morality exhibition (for the defense-and-grit monger) -- it's a game! Basketball, like all games with an undetermined ending, is all about the process of determination. The process by which a team separates itself from its opponent over 48 minutes, and whether that separation was to the end of a victory or a defeat. From a gamer's standpoint, what does Kobe do when he scores, precisely? He shifts the odds. Kobe plays the game, and the net result of his scoring is that he creates some separation between his favored team and his opponent's, or he gives his team new life against a favored foe. What happens when his opponent scores because of his mistake? Just the opposite, obviously. The odds drift away from his team. Every miss, turnover, and assist changes the odds just a little bit in one direction or the other, depending on the game time and the strengths of the respective teams and players. Odds upon odds, adrift -- that's all that results from the individual actions. Tides shift, chances wane.

The game the Lakers need to play over the next two years to win might be one that we've never seen before. One with crushingly brilliant offense and comically poor defense. Maybe that's the strategy that maximizes the Lakers' odds. Maybe they end up playing 4 on 5 with Dwight stuck at the opposing foul line trying to stop transitions. Maybe Ron Artest plays center. Maybe Kobe plays point guard with Nash off the ball. I don't know! I'm throwing this stuff out facetiously, but not totally satirically. Bill Russell did it for stretches in Finals games if he thought his team needed it. We talked a good game about the Positional Revolution with the Heat, after all. Maybe it's time to rethink the way these guys are supposed to play instead of whinging about the myriad ways a team with no reasonable historical comparison differs from a traditional team.

• • •

My point in saying this is that we're in the midst of injury, yes, but we're also in the midst of a somewhat stifling convention. The Lakers are hurting right now, and there's no tangible lesson to be gleaned from these injuries. At least in consideration of what the Lakers could have done differently. They made some mistakes with minutes, yes, but not that many. Maybe we're witnessing the death in infancy of a legendary dynasty-that-wasn't. Or maybe we're witnessing the calibration from a team that could win 60 games in a conventional way in its sleep to a team with a harder edge -- a team always at 75% health but never lacking in fire. Or maybe we're witnessing the latest form of your mother's same-old sandbagging Lakers, continuing onwards indefinitely as an amorphous blob of a team that can never define itself except in their desire to win each game.

... Or maybe Jim Buss will just blow it all up. That too is an option.

Whatever the case, this roster (especially with the injuries that, combined with rest, just confuse the picture even further) is utterly new territory for everyone from Bill Russell to Hubie Brown to the 14-year-old Kobe fan who's seen 20 games and remembers 3. This team is new business, and they were before Dwight stepped in, before Mike Brown stepped out, and so on. This team has not exploded from conflict; it's imploded from medical reality, if anything. And we ought not to judge the identity of the implosion for awhile. Let's stop talking about what the Lakers are supposed to be. Let's take a step back and take them as they are. We've done enough judging, enough figuring.

Now that all our delusions are right cleared up about instant dynasties and obvious busts (even for skeptical observers, this is a worst case beyond all worst cases), we ought to watch and see where the ride takes us. There are sights to see aplenty, sights that stand with pride and never as spectacle. Come, watch the invulnerable Nash on his last legs. Watch Dwight Howard as an Icarus with wings mid-melt. Watch a Black Swan in Gasol as rare as revolution. And, of course? Watch Kobe. We call him Black Mamba, but in the wake of the implosion it's time to see if he can be a chameleon. Slither more fully into the versatility he has shown this season. And Kobe must be the center of this story, as he always has been. For all one may dismiss the mysticism that surrounds his impact on the game, there's something so unpredictable and fascinating about the way he shifts the odds pathologically towards his own victory and yet never quite enough to shift those odds in a way that leaves you satisfied.

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"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Greetings, my fellow Small Marketeers! Small Market Mondays is back! Today I'll be subbing in for Other Alex, who is currently lecturing about the evils of big markets at several prominent small-market universities. I'm told they're receiving him well, which is right and proper considering it's the gospel truth. Now, I'm a little bit different from Other Alex. Not in our approach, for we are both supreme craftsman with an eye to the hustle of scrappers and the grift of hustlers. No, we differ only in our ideologies, and even then, only slightly. But let's talk about it. See, whereas Other Alex wants as life mission to call attention to the wonders of basketball, the miracles of chessboxing, and the pleasurable communal experience of being a small market fan, I yearn for more, brothers and sisters.

I yearn for more than is coded in the San Antonio passes and their gradual, graceful struggle with age. I yearn for more than Marc Gasol's passing or Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and his amazing length to block centers at the rim. I crave for more than Kevin Durant's sparkling offensive efficiency and always remembering to thank his teammates. I crave more than Boris Diaw and Ricky Rubio playing the passing equivalent of Starcraft against one another with the other 8 players to the scent of puppy breath and cinnamon crepes with Andorra at stake. I need more.

Unfortunately, unlike many sports fans content to fill in the void with large-market spectacle and crowd-sourced, manufactured large-market hype and debacle for the sake of itself, I must look inward, for more, and it is terrifying what I find. There are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophies, Horatio, but bless you sincerely for trying! Have you ever seen a shog'goth?

Anyway, one day several years ago, I looked inward in this manner. And then outward. And then shivered! Because I had walked into the rain while I wasn't paying attention. A hard rain was falling outside, and I beheld in a raindrop falling into my hand, for the tiniest instant, the smallest market. It was adorable, guys. Anyway, as is my wont, I immediately went to my Victorian-era loom and reproduced from memory all the jerseys and franchise history I had seen in this rain drop. 18-foot-tall centers. Point guards smaller than the transom above my door at Miskatonic. Small forwards with such a vertical that they actually went into geosynchronous orbit, never to return. I had discovered the Miskatonic Hard Rain Droplet Rainy Day Humans, Part #85 and #96. The franchise had won so many championships, you guys, but David Stern evaporated all of that with mean-spirited, chemical precision. I know they had attendance issues, I know a rain drop is barely bigger or more populous than Sleep Train Arena. I get that. But tradition, man! Apparently we can talk about Willis Reed, but before we can even get into Schiller Freed (real; played for Babylon in 8080 B.C.) we have to wade through all sorts of conspiracy theories. And that's just sad. All I'm saying.

I say this all much to my friend Other Alex's chagrin. He doesn't believe me about the franchise in the raindrops, the markets smaller than quarks, the markets larger than continents with untold aeons of tradition (and my hipster garment company's steady, perfunctory commodification of every drop of this tradition) . But no matter, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus, and he's an oversized power forward from one of the Baltic States. Other Alex doesn't believe me. But for this one week, I took over his column. I proverbially drank the oil of his content production, diagonally. I lord over all that I see. And besides, if I were just making all of this up, I wouldn't have been made a professor at Miskatonic University. Anyway, the game of the week is, oh, let's say, San Antonio and OKC tonight. That's pretty cool, especially if you only know about the traditionally-recognized franchises. All this is to emphasize something The Other Alex pointed out last week.

Chris Duhon: Not even once.

• • •

~ Lakers Talk ~

Anyway, my dyed-in-the-wool small-market heart almost (almost) feels a tug of sympathy for the drama unfolding in Laker-land. But then I remember that Los Angeles is such a large market that it can easily support not one, but two NBA teams. And the market's economic draw constantly threatens to drain even a third team from scrappy locales like Sacramento into the sinful clutches of the Anaheim (which I, unfamiliar, picture as marauding stampede of wild horses of metal and diamonds arranged in a horrifying Platinum Triangle of horse-flesh, a gigantic neo-urban redevelopment district that exists to surround Angel Stadium and host the siren Gwen Stefani who will sing the world to sleep one day, a redevelopment planned to be populated with mixed-use streets and high-rises that stretch to the infinite sky.) There are no Angels left on earth, no Mighty Ducks, no Kings or Fisher Kings left in Los Angeles. Go, all pretense of justice! Go, all sense of community deprived from the world! Go and let us make a large market for the sake of a large market!

But I digress slightly. To put it more bluntly, Steve Nash, a Canadian (for Canada is the ultimate small market) is literally the only thing redeeming about Southern California right now. I cannot pity the Lakers and their horrifying 11-14 start, I have trouble sympathizing for the people of Los Angeles. And the Lakers aren't even bad, they're just mediocre! Welcome to a fun season for the vast majority of the league! The Nuggets may not be thrilled with their 50-win course, but I somehow doubt Andre Miller is right now silently weeping blood into an empty cistern as an oblation to Cthulhu like Kobe Bryant surely is at this very second. Because Dre gets that there are worse situations than 50 wins, even for the perpetually unsatisfied professional athlete. Andre Miller is having none of these blood-weeping ceremonies. Andre Miller is just sitting in a comfy chair, chilling out and finding his favorite old cartoons on YouTube, ostensibly clad in loose-fitting clothes, a night-cap, and his perpetual, terminal case of bedhead. Andre Miller is chilling out. He will have none of your temper tantrums to the media.

What's more, even though the Lakers aren't great, the second team from Los Angeles is: thriving, exciting, and clearly in contention, the Clippers almost make you forget that they were forged from pure evil by Donald Sterling from the gigantic husk of the last Buffalo. So forget how sad the lowly Lakers' situation is: Even this season, it's unfair that one market can be doing so well. Even when the Lakers are mediocre, the Clippers seem to pick up the slack, and for that reason I have trouble feeling anything for the Lakers. All this is to emphasize something The Other Alex pointed out last week.

Chris Duhon: Not even once.

Thank you for reading.

• • •

[Ed. Note: ALEX ARNON COME HOME SOON WHAT IS THIS HELL]

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Everyone of them knew that as time went by they'd
Get a little bit older and a little bit slower but...

"Revolution #9" The Beatles

Ultimately this season has been a cautionary tale for the Lakers so far on what it actually means to get older. We don't know just what the season has in store for the Lakers, and later in this piece we're going to take a long look at their schedule. But given that there have been so many unbelievable twists and turns, I decided it might be nice to get this moment, possibly the Lakers' nadir as a franchise, in amber (you know, like from that episode of House), for posterity. Okay, so it's December 14th, and I've gone through about four stages of feelings with the Lakers this season, as a Spurs fan and as a basketball fan in general.

1. Abject Sports Horror - "They did it again! How did they do it! ..." I have used the ellipsis to omit several unpublishable 8000-word rants. The Los Angeles Lakers had acquired Dwight Howard and Steve Nash. Their starting five looked legendary. Not much to say.

2. Schadenfreude - 1-4, they fired Mike Brown, and didn't hire Phil Jackson. Kobe made public comments. Hack-A-Howard worked. Twice. Glorious swoon.

3. Abject Sports Horror 2: Electric Boogaloo - Fun fact: I hadn't at all considered the idea that a bad season might be more horrifying than a good season. For all the fear I had of what the Lakers could do, I hadn't realized how awful a flop would actually be. Not in some big picture "It's fun to hate the Lakers and the league suffers when they aren't a dynasty" sense. I mean in the small-picture. "Wait, I like Steve Nash! I might root against him, but he make the game a lot more fun for everyone, myself included! I also like Kobe, Gasol, and Dwight, as players! It's fascinating to watch each of the four and they are all amazing players." The schadenfreude wears off. You start to laugh at Kobe's vintage season being wasted... but then you think about it for five seconds and realize that Kobe is having a vintage season that's being completely wasted. Dwight Howard can't make a weakside play to save his life. Pau Gasol looks about 48 years old. Steve Nash looks about 38, which is 10 years old than he's ever looked. Four generational talents. Four wasted seasons. Steve Nash might never play another full season. Quite distressing.

4. Overriding Curiosity - We have to lower our expectations for this team, if not in terms of potential than in terms of record. Every loss will not be made up in March. A recalibration is inevitable. Even those of us (Aaron and myself included) who had huge questions about age and the bench need to recalibrate: Aaron did his thesis on aging and I was in close contact with him, he was absolutely concerned about the Lakers entering the season. And even before that, I've long held to Bill James' principle that aging happens much more quickly than any of us are generally willing to admit. But neither of us saw this. Hence our recalibration, in which an impulse akin to leadership emerges, and I start to wonder just what the heck this team would look like at full strength again. The Spurs and Celtics from the last couple of years and the 2011 Mavericks were pretty long in the tooth, after all, and those teams were a lot of fun to watch (okay, not the Celtics, but they've had their moments). Heck, the previous iteration of the Lakers (Bynum-Odom-Gasol-Kobe) was pretty darn old and that team's offense was awesome at times. The Lakers could still be scary.

Okay, thanks for indulging me. Now, let's move from what the Lakers_ have done_ to what the Lakers can do, in terms of what that would mean for their remaining schedule.

• • •

Here's Dave McMenamin, laying out the template:

In the NBA's past three full seasons, the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference has averaged 48 wins. After Thursday, the Lakers need to go 39-20 to reach that mark, basically win two out of every three remaining games. Up to this point this season, they've been winning only two out of every five.

39-20. 39 wins, 20 losses. Keep that in mind, it's the bench-mark I'll be using for this article. Anyway, now that the Lakers have to be a good team just to make the playoffs and a great team just to get first-round home-court, they are truly in a playoff mode, by no choice of their own. Having to avoid 21 losses in 59 games? That's not a grinding NBA season, that's a win-or-go-home mentality more at home in an NFL season than an NBA grind. They might not need 48 wins total, but the Western Conference is pretty darn good, and every loss chips further away at the Lakers' margin of error, subtly shifting the odds away from a thriving season.

I can't help but be reminded of the 2010 Spurs. Beset by injuries to Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and a suddenly aging Tim Duncan, the 2010 Spurs went only 50-32 and were pigeonholed into a three-way tie for the bottom of the playoff heap. It was easily their worst regular season of the Tim Duncan era, and Tim Duncan had the first losing month in the regular season of his career in January 2010. And yet, because of the immense amount of struggle, finding their identity nightly, and actually having to get good (not just shore things up) on the Rodeo Road Trip? In the end, one could make a good case that the season's slog helped them, and they dominated the Mavericks in the first-round 2-7 matchup with a six-game win. In fact, Popovich inarguably tanked Game 5. Unless you want to argue that Gregg Popovich, one of the greatest coaches of all time, really thought literally playing Roger Mason 27:36 was actually his best option for winning that game. Heh.

All this to say that while home-court obviously helps (and to use an example straight from the depths of Tinseltown, it's hard to argue HCA didn't swing the 2010 Finals), even more important than home court is putting out the best basketball product you can. The Lakers are going to find that basketball product or they're not going to make the playoffs. That's the tall and short of it. Thrive or die. No other options. True dichotomy. Yes, yes, the Lakers of recent memory may be the masters of the 54-win season that tells you nothing about their playoff readiness, and it'll take a prorated 54-win season (39/59) to clinch the playoffs.

But well, let's look at the Lakers' season so far.

First, note that they've had a fine point differential (prior to the games of December 14). They're +2.17 in 23 games, which is good for 10th overall. They've dramatically underperformed in their record (Basketball-Reference has them at 13-10 Pythagorean wins; they sit 4 games behind expectation at 9-14). Yes, middling, and yes, they've destroyed lesser teams and gotten close to good ones only after the outcome had been decided. But their differential is still 5th in the West behind the Thunder (9.27!), Clippers (7.59), Spurs (7.46), and Grizz (6.53). So the Lakers aren't bad, per se. Just misunderstood?

Let's delve into the Lakers' remaining schedule briefly (Ed. Note: by briefly he means exhaustively) to see how they could get those 39 wins.

(Very technical note: I use point differentials to separate contenders from pretenders because point differentials are less subject to random chance than records, and predict future records better. On the other hand, this isn't inherently true: Thanks to Dirk's unique skillset in late-game situations, the Mavs seem to systematically overperform their differential and dominate in the clutch. Something like Dwight Howard's free throws and Kobe's complex clutch skillset may similarly mean that the Lakers are systematically underperforming their differential. And also, let's note that because the Lakers may have underperformed does NOT mean they will overperform their differential in the future. That's not how conditional probability works.)

• • •

Because the Lakers indeed have a decent differential, most of the teams in the league are worse (even far worse) than the Lakers. And of the Lakers' 59 remaining games, the Lakers play fully 41 of those remaining games against teams with point differentials that are currently worse (even marginally). The home-away breakdown for these 41 games is 19 home, 22 away. Now, despite their differential, the Lakers are actually 8-9 against these teams so far. They're 6-4 at home, and 2-5 away, in a 10 to 7 home-away breakdown that should favor the Lakers heavily.

It's pretty amazing they have a losing record, actually.

If the Lakers go 20-21 in these games, as you might project from their dismal performance thus far? They will have 35 losses right there, and even if they beat the Thunder, Clippers, Spurs, Knicks, Grizzlies, Hawks, Heat, Bulls, and Nets in every remaining matchup, they'll have a 47-win season. The takeaway here is that Lakers must dominate worse teams, must win nearly every game they're supposed to win. They must dominate much worse teams on road. Morris must dominate Fisher. Yes, the Lakers won't likely lose to the Bobcats or Wizards (whom they're playing tonight!). But keep in mind the home-road split of 19 to 22, and keep in mind that "worse teams" includes a core of bubble teams in the West. A road game against the Nuggets or Jazz is historically no picnic.

Looking at the field, the caramel-filled core of teams that should most concern the Lakers are the bundle of mediocre Western teams including the Warriors, Jazz, T'Wolves, Mavs, Nuggets, and Rockets. All of these teams have worse differential than the Lakers; the Jazz are the only ones especially close. These games I'd like to highlight because the teams involved are a) possible head-to-head tiebreakers for the Lakers b) crucial challenge games that should provide litmus tests between pretenders and contenders. Now that the Lakers know these are important games, we can look at these games more accurately as the crucial leverage points they represent. Win or lose, Lakers must show they are generally better than these teams and can beat them in a playoff-type atmosphere. No, they don't have to win every game in this core. You fully expect them to lose a few of these games on road trips. But you have to see if they will compete, if they'll get better relative to these teams, and so on. That's what we're looking for, and it's why Lakers fans should have these games circled.

This group of bubble games accounts for 14 of their remaining games (6 home, 8 away). So far the Lakers have actually had a good sample of these games. They've had eight so far, and gone 4-4 (not impressive, but not insanely bad, either. Yes, this is a theme, the Lakers look like the quintessential 45-win Rockets/Grizz squad right now, statistically). Of these 8 games, 5 have been at home (3-2) and 3 away (1-2). Not much to say; it's a small sample from an injured team. But it's interesting that they haven't managed any separation.

In any case, 14 games against the bubble teams means that the rest of the 41 against worse teams are basically 27 games against a) significantly worse teams in the West like Portland and Sacramento, b) significantly worse teams in the East like Charlotte and Washington, c) decent teams like Boston and Indiana and Milwaukee that have looked middling on average (for Indiana, "middling" is the average of "horrifying" and "very good"). These 27 games, the Lakers should (and must!) dominate. Being quite serious, if the Lakers drop 9 of these 27, they have to go 21-11 against their direct opponents and (right now) their superiors in the East and West just to hit 48 wins. The Lakers must take these games against (for the most part) obviously inferior opponents. Not kidding, if the Lakers don't beat the Bobcats and Wizards twice, they will legitimately have trouble getting to the playoffs. This is the world we're living in, in 2012. Blah blah blah: Mayans were right.

• • •

Finally, we've broken down their games against inferior teams, let's look at the statement games facing the Lakers, in which they can really show they belong among the pack. Talent-wise they've clearly proved this over the years, but health is a serious question. And the heights they reached last year they may not reach again. These are the games in which they can make that case. These are the Thunder, Clippers, Spurs, Knicks, Grizzlies, Hawks, Heat, Bulls, and Nets. So far they've gone 1-5 against these teams, and their only win was a 5-point takedown of Brooklyn. At home. Yes, Virginia -- the Lakers don't currently have any staple wins on the road. They're 0-3 on the road against teams with a better point differential than them. And even at home they're only 1-2.

Luckily, they have plenty of chances to prove themselves. They have 18 remaining games with better differential, 9 home, 9 away. If they go 3-15? That's the season, basically. I don't think they will do quite this poorly. But they have to get some statement wins, and they have to at least get a winning record at home, in my opinion. If they go 3-6 on the road? No big deal if they manage to pull even at home. The road games? Not necessarily the games you're not supposed to dominate. Schedule losses, games you're happy if you can come out alive from. Tom Thibodeau, Gregg Popovich, Chris Paul, Horford-Smith, Z-Bo-Gasol-Gay. LeBron. Et cetera. Teams that can run the Lakers out of the gym but the Lakers with a healthy Nash and Gasol should easily win from time to time. And if the Lakers can find a way to make the road games tough, and make their home court once again something where teams fear to tread? Yeah, they could make the playoffs and make a strong case for themselves as worthy contenders.

It's their season to make it happen. They play the Wizards tonight. Every loss matters, saps them of just a little more strength. But every win exults them and sets them on that fertile path to the championship, though right now that must seem miles away to a middling team in a city by the ocean.

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Marcin Gortat recently had a fascinating talk with Przeglad Sportowy's Marcin Harasimowicz after his game against the Los Angeles Lakers. The interview is in Polish, but worry not, there's no Google Translate needed. Because you have me, a bilingual Pole on a mission to share the latest updates in the life of everyone's favorite Polish Gazelle-Hammering Machine. Additionally, the portal reports Gortat rejected an extension for the 2014-15 season, and might be traded, as the Magic, Mavs, Bulls and Celtics are interested in his services. Yikes. Gortat's comments are worth noting for anyone following the Suns franchise and its solid Polish center.

Here's the interview (full interview and my reaction after the jump). All credit to Przeglad Sportowy and Marcin Harasimowicz, of course.

• • •

A lot has changed in the Suns since last season.
Marcin Gortat: Unfortunately, in my case – for worse. I'm certainly not the player I was last season, I need to find my place in the new order. I'm still capable of helping this team, and regularly recording a double double, but when the ball sticks to one person on offence, it's hard to find a good rhythm.

Last season you've scored a lot of points off of Steve Nash pick and rolls. The team doesn't play that way anymore.
MG: That's true, but I can score in various situations. Finishing pick and rolls, in transition, from midrange, around the rim. There are a lot of options. Unfortunately, my two strongest plays – the pick and roll and post-ups have been taken away from me. It's not easy, we have a lot of plays that don't include me. And my chemistry with Goran Dragic hasn't been quite equal to what I had with Steve. These are things that we need to work on.

Coach Alvin Gentry told me that the main post option was Luis Scola. You, on the other hand, are number one on defense.
MG: Unfortunately... I've been doing the dirty work all my life, and now I have to come back to that. I will fight for what's mine. I'll try to prove to the coach that I can play an important role in the offence. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm even an option for Gentry. He doesn't even take me into consideration. The situation is critical. We're playing the same thing we've been playing last year, but the truth is we have a completely different set of players. I don't think it really works. I can't get frustrated now though, I have to stay positive.

The Suns have a lot of players that create for themselves.
MG: We have plenty of players who like to create for themselves, but it doesn't always work. We don't share the ball as much as we have in previous seasons. The ball doesn't move around the perimeter – it usually stops after one or two passes. You can't play like this, let alone win. Basketball is a team sport. Nobody ever won a game alone.

Before the season you were promising a fight for the playoffs, but from the picture painted by the past few games, the Suns don't seem like a top 8 team in the West.
MG: Before the season started, I was a huge optimist. I thought we'd play a completely different game. Right now, it doesn't look good. We still have a lot to learn, and a lot to fight for. We need to fix our team defence. We can't give up a hundred points per game. We'll see how it works out. Right now, I'm not losing hope, there's still a shot at the playoffs.

Did the coach honestly tell you what he expects from you?
MG: We've talked before the season started. He said he expects me to play defence, rebound, block shots and quarterback the defence. He also said he wanted me to set up in the paint and wait for my shots. And I'm still waiting... (laughter)

What are you expecting in the coming week?
MG: After the game against the Miami Heat, we have a longer break and some time to correct some errors in practice. It won't be easy though.

Maybe you should have an honest conversation with Coach Gentry?
MG: I don't know if it will change anything. But I'll surely have a chat with him.

While in Los Angeles, have you talked to Steve Nash?
MG: Yes, he came in for a visit in the locker room. I can only sigh – too bad he isn't with us any longer...

• • •

Just to mention it: This isn't the first time that Marcin has said something stupid in Polish thinking nobody would know. A few years back on a kid's camp in Poland, Gortat took a minor dig at Robin Lopez. Innocent, but nevertheless not the nicest thing to do to your teammate. Now, he's taken it to another level. And look, almost every Pole knows English well enough to tell an English speaker he's whining about the coach. And there are many people beyond me who can translate the interview in its entirety. Make no mistake, Gortat's comments will reach Coach Alvin Gentry, and make no mistake, the coach will not be happy. This is not what a leader does to a team. This is not going to help a team struggling for chemistry and cohesion. Gentry's rather obvious lack of trust in Gortat's offensive prowess aren't good excuses to go up in flames with this kind of an interview. And with the changes in the starting lineup Gentry has announced are coming, a part of me fears Alvin will punish Marcin by replacing him with Jermaine O'Neal, further hurting the team. That wouldn't be a good decision by Gentry, but Gortat is putting Gentry in a difficult position with these comments, and so some of the blame has to go to Gortat if this happens.

In the context of the Suns' current struggles, it's worth noting that Gortat makes a lot of good points. At the time of the conversation, which took place after the loss with the Lakers on Friday, the Suns were 4-6. Today, they're 4-7, as Gortat continued to struggle to get touches, despite being in prime position to finish off a nice play at times. Note that the Suns haven't won a game yet without Gortat scoring in double digits, and it's not easy to get to double digits when you get six shots per game. Now, this might seem to be a quibble, but note that when he's on the floor, Gortat tends to lose out on shot opportunities to Luis Scola and Michael Beasley, both to poor effect. Beasley has an atrocious command of pick-and-rolls as the ball-handler (.55 on 31 possessions per Synergy) and every possession Beasley uses in the two-man game is basically wasted. Compare Beasley to teammate Goran Dragic's stellar .95 mark on 63, good for fifth in the league. You could also point to Luis Scola's poor chemistry with Gortat (they occupy more or less the same range and Gentry hasn't found plays to capitalize on the Gortat-Scola tandem). And, in Gortat's favor, Gortat has proved that he can lead a decent team (last year's Suns) in scoring. Gortat is extremely potent moving off the ball. He can get easy opportunities and open up opportunities for his teammates in the process. And while Steve Nash is no longer there to spoon feed him, I'm more than certain Marcin can work with the entire team at getting baskets. Even viewed as a Nash product, Gortat is perfectly capable of scoring without Nash, and that alone makes him worth a shot. A shot that Gentry fails to give him.

The substance of his comments is solid; the inflammatory nature of his comments is not, and perforce puts the Suns into a dilemma. By giving Gortat what he wants, they might make the offence more efficient, but they will show him he can bully them. Or they could keep him unhappy, potentially ruining his upcoming contract. Or, of course, there's the nuclear option alluded to above: They trade him for youth and finally give up on whatever was left of the season [Ed. Note: Since there are three options this is technically a trilemma, not a dilemma. Anyway, there's the door, I'll show myself out. -Dewey]. Whatever the case, the Suns are suddenly at a crossroads here, and so is Marcin Gortat. This coming week might be pivotal in deciding the fate of both the center and the team in its entirety. The Polish Hammer has rebelled, whatever comes next might affect more than Planet Orange, but the entire NBA.

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Gary Neal, Jose Calderon, and Bismack Biyombo.

• • •

Follow _Gary Neal on Twitter at @GNeal14.
_

Yesterday's end-of-post riddle, used to describe Gary Neal, may surprise many who are aware that I'm a Spurs fan.

Player #262 has no conscience, and will take shots regardless of the in-game situation or his likelihood of making the shot. He's still extraordinarily effective at it, though, and will probably get a very nice contract next offseason after he playing a strong bench role on a very good team this year.

"What? A Spurs fan basically calling a Spur a chucker? You wouldn't!"

Well, yes, I would. Because it's true. Gary Neal is a good player, and over the last two years he's been among the most bang-for-your-buck contracts in the league. The man's been making less than a million dollars a year to put up Jamal Crawford-type numbers, with better percentages and a bit of a stronger handle. But none of that truly hides or obfuscates the fact that "no conscience" is exactly the way any seasoned NBA scribe would describe him. And none of this is really a bad thing, in a vacuum. I don't love Neal's split-second decisions with a massive amount of time left to run the offense, but in the aggregate, they help. Neal's insane split-second decisions are often incredibly stupid, but they work. They make the defense doubt itself, and help instill fear of the offense into any solid defense. Suddenly, the defense is overcommitting a shade to try and prevent another random basket out of nowhere. They tighten. They make mistakes. The creases appear. And then the Spurs offensive machine goes to work and takes advantage.

While that's all true, I also didn't say it was a bad thing. I wasn't kidding when I said he was extraordinarily effective at it -- he is. Neal has the lovely distinction of being one of the least-assisted guards in the league despite being one of the best three point shooters around. To wit, here are the top ten 3 point shooters in the league with a minimum of 3 attempts per game:

1. Stephen Curry -- 45.5% on 4.7 shots a game (78.2% assisted)
2. Ray Allen -- 45.3% on 5.1 shots a game (93.4% assisted)
3. Brandon Rush -- 45.2% on 3.4 shots a game (94.9% assisted)
4. Jordan Farmar -- 44.0% on 3.2 shots a game (83.6% assisted)
5. Danny Green -- 43.6% on 3.5 shots a game (93.1% assisted)
6. Kyle Korver -- 43.5% on 4.2 shots a game (93.2% assisted)
7. Jerryd Bayless -- 42.3% on 3.4 shots a game (77.3% assisted)
8. Richard Jefferson -- 42.0% on 4.6 shots a game (96.3% assisted)
9. Matt Bonner -- 42.0% on 3.8 shots a game (99.0% assisted)
10. Gary Neal -- 41.9% on 3.5 shots a game (54.2% assisted)

Notice anything funny about Neal's line, there? It's the percent assisted, which I demarcated in red. That measures how many of their shots were assisted on behind the arc. Neal's percentage assisted is supernaturally low -- the only guard with a lower percentage of his threes assisted in the top 30 than Neal was Kyrie Irving. The man can shoot, and he makes them at a top-10 clip despite taking an insane amount of them off the dribble and outside of any set play. He's the yin to Matt Bonner's yang, and quite literally the exact opposite of what Bonner gives the Spurs on the court. Whereas Bonner represents the threat if a team lets a set play execute to completion, Neal represents the threat of what happens if a team doesn't. What happens if you force the mismatch and the Spurs have to chuck one up? Well, they have Neal, a fearless and patently absurd pressure valve that helps make defending the Spurs less a matter of shutting down plays and more a manner of shutting down fate -- the difference between the offensively solid and the offensively elite. So good on you, Gary Neal.

The one issue with Neal -- and it is a relatively tricky one for his prospects as more than a pressure valve -- is that he can't do all that much else. And what's worse, his defense is absolutely awful. The Spurs have been a consistently worse defensive team with Neal on the court during his career, and that's not for no reason. To compensate, the Spurs have tried to develop his skills as a backup point guard. This hasn't worked particularly well, however, and while he's a remotely passable backup point guard in certain situations he's no great shakes at setting up offense for players who aren't named "Gary Neal." Which means he can't really share the court with anyone who's better than he is at offense. Which will be an issue going forward. Another issue is that he simply doesn't rate out well on the tertiary statistics, even compared to his position, where few players do. His rebound rate was pathetic (even for a guard, he was below par), he rarely drew charges (in his rookie season, Neal drew zero charges in 1,683 minutes of play), and his steal/block rates are bad enough to be hilarious (he has blocked 6 shots in his entire NBA career). A player that shoots like Neal does will be a highly valued member of just about any NBA team, and my guess is the Spurs will end up flipping him in a trade sometime this season for another defensive big off the bench, in anticipation of Neal getting an offer sheet the Spurs can't reasonably match in restricted free agency. But I suppose we'll see -- personally, I thought they'd do the same with Dejuan Blair last season.

• • •

_Follow Jose Calderon on Twitter at __@josemcalderon8.___

Although Jose Calderon has his issues, I'll start with something most don't realize -- Calderon is one of the top passers in the league. Really! He posted one of the highest assist rates in the league, putting up the 3rd highest rate among point guards getting more than 20 minutes a contest. It's very fun to watch Calderon pass, and his personal offensive talents make it even easier for him to do his job distributing. If Calderon wasn't one of the best shooting point guards in the league (which he is -- deadly shooter off the dribble from just about everywhere on the court), he wouldn't ever draw double teams -- if he didn't draw doubles,__ it'd be far more rare for him to get a chance to dazzle with one of his patented bounce-out-of-the-double passes or needle-threading dishes through two defenders to a cutting Raptor. His offense is brilliant, and it's a pity that at his age he has too much trouble generating his own to resort to it often. He rated out as one of the lowest-usage point guards in the NBA, which would be fine if he wasn't so incredibly efficient that even just a few more shots would've dramatically helped his dismal offensive team. He's got a perhaps worse problem than Rajon Rondo -- Rondo doesn't generate much of his own offense because he's not fantastic at it. Calderon doesn't generate much of his own offense because... he's old? Other than a general inability to get into the paint, aptly noted by John Hollinger in his own player profiles, Calderon's passivity on the offensive end given his efficiency has always been a bit annoying, and the one bugaboo that keeps his offense from being as elite as the numbers imply.

But that all ignores the biggest problem with Calderon. That is, defense. People get on Steve Nash's case for his poor defense, and that's fine. Nash is not a good defender. But Jose Calderon is much, much worse -- and what's worse for Calderon is that he's gotten absolutely no better as the defense around him has improved. It was a bit easier to say "well, perhaps it's the surrounding personnel" when he was on Triano-led teams that were shiftless and useless on the defensive end. It's significantly harder to blame the supporting cast when, like last year, the team was defensively solid overall but still awful with Calderon on the court. The issue here is partly one of reputation -- Calderon has developed a deserved reputation for terrible defense, which has caused opposing teams to take advantage of his blown coverage more often on an in-game basis than they would if there wasn't five years of scouting backing it up. You don't see most coaches making a similar effort to force their guards to challenge rookies nearly as much as they force challenges to Calderon, and that's simply because there's a much higher margin of error on how the rookie will defend. The rookie could be good, or could be bad, or could be so average that it doesn't impart a serious defensive advantage. But Calderon has been doing this so long that everyone who knows anything about the league knows about his matador defense, which makes it an attractive target and an over-leveraged strategy on the defensive end against Toronto. Or, at least, it would be over-leveraged... if it didn't keep working.

• • •

_Follow Bismack Biyombo on Twitter at __@bismackbiyombo0.___

Bismack Biyombo had a pretty subpar rookie season, at least on the offensive end. While the broader struggles of the Bobcats tended to demand a more singular focus in their historic futility, few people understand just how bad Biyombo was at producing even a minimal amount of offense. Biyombo didn't have a single above-average shooting range in his rookie year -- he was below the position average at the rim, from 3-9 feet, from 10-15 feet, and 16-23 feet. Often by quite a bit, too, as he rated out the 13th worst center in the league from 3-9 feet and the 4th worst from 10-15. Pretty rough. He compounded those miscues by posting a top-tier turnover rate (not in a good way -- he was among the bottom 25% of all centers in controlling the ball) and an awful rebounding rate. Add to that his absurdly poor assist rate, and you don't really have the recipe for a good year. About the only thing Biyombo did well was get to the free throw line, posting a top tier FTA/FGA mark for a center. Unfortunately, even that wasn't really his doing -- his percentage from the line was sub-50%, so desperate defenses would often succumb to the temptations of Smack-a-Bismack to send him to the line and avoid playing defense.

On defense, Biyombo was passable and promising. He was probably the best defensive talent on the Bobcats, although I caution that such a statement is hardly saying much. His block percentage was extraordinarily high, rating out as 5th overall in the entire league. I'm always a wary man when it comes to conflating a high block percentage with a solid defensive skillset, but frankly, he does have a solid defensive skillset and it goes far beyond the blocks alone. His wingspan is enormous and his spindly mobility is well-suited to cause havoc if he develops correctly. His weakside defense was already relatively decent. His big problems? Defending one-on-one, and blowing up plays that were directly sent his way. He was shiftless at disrupting the pick and roll last season and relatively poor in the post. With time, those should improve. But if they don't, his block totals aren't going to really help his team all that much, as last year's results tended to indicate -- the Bobcats were actually a worse defensive team with Biyombo on the court than off it, which is absurd to conceptualize in a vacuum given how poor their defense was overall.

In my view, the nicest thing I can really say with respect to Paul Silas' work on the 2011 Bobcats was rooted in the fact that Biyombo and Walker finally began to earn the minutes they should've been playing all year as the year wound down. I understand that when you play as poorly as Biyombo played, it's hard to get you minutes. That's reasonable. But the team was quite literally one of the worst teams of all time, and Silas (to his credit) eventually realized it. After a certain point, it's really hard to get that much worse, and you might as well start giving your super-raw rookies a ton of burn as you assess what they bring to the table. Silas seemed to get it in the abstract, and Biyombo's minutes did get larger as the season went along. To wit: Biyombo averaged more minutes per game every consecutive month of the season -- he averaged just 10 MPG in December, 13 in January, 24 in February, 29 in March, 31 in April. I do think they should've gone up a tad more and a tad earlier, but Silas deserves a lot of credit for catching on at all. All too often, coaches never realize their players need more minutes. He still continued his aggravating trend of pulling with early foul trouble and generally keeping Biyombo on a short leash even after he decided to start him, but we'll let that slide. For now.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Today's sole 3/3 comes on behalf of @MillerNBA, who is good at this game.

• Player #265 has broken the hearts of many-a good team. Well, one good team and a few terrible teams. He's back on the "terrible" end of the spectrum now.
• Player #266 has started more NBA Finals games at center than Dwight Howard. This is without question my favorite piece of non-Trey Johnson NBA Trivia. He only started 9 games last season, so he's falling off (HEH), but it's still hilarious.
• I don't really get why Player #267 decided to play hardball with his contract until training camp ended -- few contenders are really going to want to try and meld him into their schemes without any camp burn. AND he probably won't get a bigger contract than the minimum anymore anyway! Good work, dude.

Was hoping to get 6 sets done this week. Looks unlikely, but 5 should be possible.

• • •

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My parents separated when I was 10 years old. To this day, I remember vividly the moment my dad shut the door behind him, a stuffed and angrily packed suitcase in tow. Nothing was really the same for young Adam since. Had this not happened, I might've never been the person I am today. Actually, scratch the might -- I'm pretty damn sure about that.

A few years later, my dad would get a lucrative offer from an American company. The problem? He'd have to live in the US, and would only be able to come to Poland once a month. Even though I cried and begged him to stay, (thinking he was the cool parent, the one I'd rather spend my time with) he still took the offer. After all, it would only be six months or so. Still -- these six months ended up being pretty bad. My mom was pretty depressed after the divorce, and my childlike self savoured the time spent with my dad. He'd play video games with me, take me to lunch to my favourite Tex-Mex place, everything. Every weekend was great, which only made me appreciate him more when he came back for good.

Of course, that was then. Ever since, my dad managed to completely ruin all those memories, and make them into a melancholic journey. You see, in Poland, child support -- due to the reluctance of people to hire college folk -- is held up until age 26. This is for divorced couples, and married ones alike. The only difference is that divorced couples know exactly how much they have to pay. My dad did. And he wanted to change that. So right around my 18th birthday, my dad sued me. I ended up having to deal with all the blowback from the divorce, contacting lawyers, appearing in court, calling executors. It wasn't fun. It wasn't enjoyable. It wasn't right. At least I won, though. We only met once after the trial, for almost exclusively business reasons. Oh, and so my dad could say some mean things about my mom, of course. Then, once again, my dad vanished. It turned out later that he'd left for Canada along with his wife, and my step-brother. I'd only found out because my friend chatted with my step-brother. I didn't even get a proper goodbye, and when I'd mustered up the courage to send him an angry e-mail, I received an answer that somehow blamed me for being angry.

• • •

All of that stuff -- the email, et cetera -- happened a year ago. It was one of the reasons why I started watching basketball. To escape, to live vicariously through the players I liked. Perhaps that's why I was so emotionally invested in it. And never was it displayed better than on the morning of the 5th of July. I came back home exhausted, after a LAN party with my friends. We had fun, we screamed, we ate pizza, and then went back home. As I exited the subway, I decided to check my phone for updates on twitter. The internet was running slow, but I managed to read a bunch of tweets mentioning me, wondering how I would react.

Oh well, Steve Nash must've signed with the Knicks. I was expecting this all day. Meh. I thought to myself, as I got into a bus. When I got home, it turned out I'd been wrong. Very wrong. Steve Nash signed in the one place he shouldn't have signed. And all the emotional involvement boiled over into an angry stream of all caps tweets. I said a lot of dumb things, after all, all excuses seemed stupid. I actually cried. And it wasn't a "Raymond Borque lifting the Stanley Cup" cry. It was a "WHYY?" cry. It was like Darth Vader.

Fortunately, I was exhausted, so I went to sleep rather quickly, and when I woke up, I'd gained some distance. It was just basketball, after all. Then I read all the interviews with Nash, and felt stupid. Stupid for blaming him for making an absolutely understandable decision. Stupid for insulting him, even if it was just an angry rant on twitter. And with every day passing, with more and more interviews coming, I just felt worse. I've defended LeBron and Dwight based only on my suspicions of internal problems stemming from young age, while not giving a single second of thought to my favourite player of all-time.

Anger creates stupid things, I guess.

Either way, almost exactly a week removed from the event, I find myself standing in awe of Steve Nash once again. But it isn't a behind the back pass, or a amazing shot that awes me this time. It's Nash's priorities as a person and basketball player. I am awed by the fact, that he'd make so many enemies, sacrifice some money (and mind you, this isn't a player that has been paid max money for all his life), the ability to come to his home country or favourite city, just to be able to see his kids once a week. There has been a lot of discussion about how genuine this is coming from Nash. Is he really doing it for the kids? Or is this an excuse? I think to accuse a man like Nash of using his kids as a cover for a business decision is rather ridiculous. Dumb, even. Perhaps not as dumb as sending him death threats and burning jerseys, but still... really, really dumb.

As a person who's had a lot of ups and downs from his own father, I can only appreciate Nash for sacrificing popularity, money and a chance to go to his homeland for his kids. And while I may end up loathing every dime Nash drops to Kobe Bryant, every pull up three off of a Pau Gasol pick and roll he nails, every beautiful alley-oop to the lurking Andrew Bynum, I will also try and remember the fact we all seem to forget. Basketball players are people with families and problems. Steve Nash may be the next in a line of basketball villains for many, but his villainy is a sacrifice he'd made to be a hero to his kids. It's a crime of must, if you will. A crime that shouldn't in one bit take away from the fact that Steve Nash -- all his basketball aside -- is just a wonderful human being that everyone should try to emulate.

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Let's go unfiltered at the Gothic Ginobili. I'd like to talk about a dream I had.

I had some expectations going in, as I vaguely became aware of my location in the dream. Like, I knew it would be a nightmare from the start because the room I was in was really well-lit, and yet from the window I could tell it was night. Great foreshadowing, dream. Also, in real life, I had been in a minor bike accident a few hours before going to sleep (I'm fine, just some scrapes), so I'd expected some flashes of violent imagery. So not just a nightmare, but a screamer as well. There was a compounding and foreboding sense of fear -- as if chemically induced -- that I felt all around me in the emptiness of the room.

• • •

Let's set the scene: As with many dreams, the room itself pretty strongly resembled my one-room apartment, but had expanded out to a somewhat gigantic one-room condo. All the hallways were bigger, there was a small hot-tub sized pool in the center (brewing like a cauldron), and all the windows and doors were much larger and more open. I felt empty and vulnerable, for some reason.

And then the horror started. The room darkened somewhat. Some of the lights in the room flickered a few times and then went to black for no apparent reason. Sometimes I would catch lights going off and right before they did, in that pregnant darkness not yet attained, I would see a figure shrouded in black. I would see this figure just briefly enough to have doubt to its existence, just starkly enough to have no doubt that - whether it existed or not - something was happening and I didn't want to be around when this process reached its culmination. I decided - as I saw street lights from outside flickering out with just the same horror - to control what I could. I closed all my windows and doors and then their blinds if possible. Right before I was able to close the last screen door, Steve Nash appeared outside the sliding door, apparently to help me.

That's right, Steve Nash.

So, yeah. I was having a horrible nightmare with apparitions haunting and then darkening my apartment, bringing my apartment slowly into total, hopeless, horrifying darkness. In the middle of this horrifying dreamscape that had consumed my apartment, diminutive point guard Steve Nash had appeared outside my door waiting to get inside. Now, Steve's chipmunk-esque face definitely had an eerie blue glow, but it was definitely Nash. I let him in without thought or care. Immediately the single light outside flickered and went out, leaving the incorporeal, nebulous, shrouded-in-black figure just 20 feet from my apartment. I slammed the door and closed the blinds. As I recall, Steve Nash didn't say anything. The few remaining lights were flickering out.

So I pushed a button on the hot tub (remember, the cauldron) which turned the unlit water into a well-lit, glowing pillar of pale blue light. This light, pale and insufficient, was the culmination of my desperate attempt to impose order on this nightmare. But in fact, this light was the start of the final unraveling of the dream. For -- as the few lights other than the cauldron's flickered into darkness, leaving its shrouded spiritual moths -- the center of the cauldron began to brew and spin, and from the center emerged this same figure rising first as random interruptions of the blue with black and then as a full, coherent figure with a totally pale face and a monstrous body that appeared to be shrouded in black clothes. I totally panicked and tried to get away from the figure, but the doors wouldn't open. Steve Nash - having an aura of blue identical to the hot-tub's - went for some reason into the cauldron and the figure consumed him into the tub. I, presumably, was next to be consumed. Paralyzed by fear, I tried in vain to get to the console and turn the cauldron's blue light off. But I couldn't.

I lay in darkness for what seemed like hours, mortified. Then the lights turned back on, Grant Hill came in through the big glass door, and he was laughing. It had all been an elaborate prank! It is important to note that he was wearing a Phoenix Suns jersey at this point. As, of course, was Steve Nash, as he left the hot tub, soaked, enjoying the spoils of the prank. Grant Hill spoke. "Haha, I can't believe you thought ghosts were real, Alex! Such a cad!" I laughed and laughed, and then I woke up, the nightmare conquered.

But then I awoke to the reality that Steve Nash (and possibly Grant Hill, as well) were going to the Lakers.

• • •

A nightmare at its essence usually takes elements of the familiar and distorts it with the unfamiliar to create the sensation of the former changing into the latter. Good horror does the same. Death honestly doesn't scare me. But the change from life to death sure does. Injuries don't scare me, as you'd learn to deal with the result. But the process of going from healthy to unhealthy in an instant of total awareness without control does scare me. Darkness doesn't scare me. But the change of light, the change from safe to unsafe, the change from familiar to unfamiliar... that scares me. Quite a lot. The nightmare I had was the distortion of empty light into inhabited darkness, of Steve Nash into vacancy and worldly vapors and death.

But the nightmare of Steve Nash - as I awoke - is now the change from Sun to Laker. A team we could root for to a team that most of us -- or at least myself -- ancestrally despise and viscerally root against. The change from Channing Frye and Marcin Gortat to Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. It turns out that -- as with LeBron -- Steve Nash without a ring is actually fundamentally different than Steve Nash with a ring. Something horrifying and grotesque and potent and assertive has to change in him (or at least the way we see him) in order for Steve Nash the Ringless to evolve into Steve Nash the Conquerer. Nothing we can do will stop it. We're not going to feel the horror of Steve Nash when he's in the West semifinals. Then it will merely be an exciting, engaging Laker team that we've lived through and become comfortable with (to whatever extent we can). No, we're feeling the pain in the transition right now, as we try to make that change from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

This is the change. This is the horror.

These are the days before dying, the blood before the clotting, the rapture before the end of time, the spinning of the handle bars before the fall, the fall before the first-aid, the three-quarter-mile of pedaling with open blood on knees and gear-shift oil in hands before the blessed oblivion of sleep. We're walking wounded in the night with zombies and friends in the distance, and from here we can't tell one from the other. Do we approach and hope for the best? Do we run and expect the worst? Or, having seen this one before, perhaps we acknowledge the nightmare, the change before us. Perhaps -- knowing there's no end to it -- we walk boldly into the night, seeking not consummation but mere merciful continuation in the pale blue street lights beside empty bars and parking lots, looking always for temporary escape and shelter.

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Hello, folks. Happy fourth. About a month back, we did a relatively successful statistical Q&A. I've been a bit absent lately, on account of residual hoops miasma, but I have today off work and it feels like a good day to bring the series back. Format is relatively simple -- for the rest of the day (or until questions dry up), I'll be answering reader questions. These can be on any number of topics -- from the offseason to the playoffs to what, pray tell, a vegetarian is going to make for dinner on the fourth of July. All's game. To start, we have an opening question from the man who had the most questions last time.

• • •

QUESTION #1: Is this your first question for the Q&A tomorrow? And yes, this is my question. from @sstewart1617

Why yes, Sam. It is. Here is a graph displaying all questions asked as of this writing for today's Q&A.

Congratulations. You were emphatically first.

• • •

QUESTION #2: Is Omer Asik a substantially more effective defender than Tyson Chandler or Dwight Howard? from @sstewart1617

The obvious answer -- simply thinking through their impact -- would be no. But when you look at the numbers, things get a bit confusing. Asik is an extremely effective defender. Looking at the overall numbers of team defensive performance when he's on the floor, the Bulls had a defensive rating of 100 with Asik off the floor and a rating of 91 with him on it -- that's the difference between a top-5 defense and a generationally revolutionary one. Tyson Chandler's on/off court splits were actually pretty bad this season -- with him on the court, the Knicks had a defensive rating of 102. Off the court? 100. Yes, the Knicks actually managed to defend better with Tyson off the court than on the court. In the case of Howard, though, you can argue that his numbers are slightly more impressive -- the Magic's Dwight-off-floor defensive rating is 109, which over a full season would likely rate out as one of the worst defenses in the league. With him on the court, they have a defensive rating of 101 -- top-5.

If you break the stats down into individual defensive stats per Synergy, Asik looks like a superior defender as well -- he sports the 24th ranked overall PPP rating of any player in the league, at 0.71 points per possession allowed. Tyson has the 104th ranked at 0.80, and Dwight has the 49th ranked rating at 0.74. His rating primarily comes off the strength of his recoveries on spot-up shooters -- NBA players score only 0.59 PPP against Asik on spot-up plays. Chandler is a bit better at isolation defense, and a bit better at defending post-ups -- Asik schools him on defending the roll man in the Pick and Roll, as well as spot-ups. Between Dwight and Asik, the same general format applies -- Dwight is better in isolation and against post-ups, but worse than Asik at guarding spot-ups and roll men. Overall, would I say Asik is more effective? I don't think so. He plays most of his minutes against bench men, and his minutes aren't meaninglessly low -- his foul rate is extremely high, and if he can't stay on the court, that does limit his effective value. But you could make a somewhat compelling argument that Asik is better than Dwight or Chandler at defending the pick and roll, or alternatively, at recovering on spot-up shooters. Which is a valuable skill. I'm not sure I really dislike Asik's contract -- if he can work on the foul trouble, he can be a top-10 center in this league. Getting one of those for a sub-eight digit contract is phenomenal.

• • •

QUESTION #3: Have you seen Troll 2? If not, why do you hate good things? from @AngeloCLE

I saw it when I was young. Don't really remember much of it. Perhaps I should see it again, someday. Especially since I make fun of Conrad about it on almost a daily basis.

• • •

QUESTION #4: Charmander, Squirtle, or Bulbasaur? from @AngeloCLE

When I was a kid, I picked Squirtle. If I had to re-choose I'd probably pick Charmander -- there just weren't enough good fire Pokemon in that game, man. Always ended up with an Arcanine or a Magmar or something, and that just aint right. It's kind of silly how many more water dudes there are than any other type. (The reason this is presently on my mind: I've been playing Soul Silver lately because I got it extremely cheap. Fun game, in a lot of ways. Kinda a slog, though, like most Pokemon games.)

• • •

QUESTION #5: Is there a big in the league that draws less fouls per 48 minutes than Matt Bonner? What about fouling someone per 48? from @sstewart1617

I'm honestly drawing a blank on where to easily look up foul drawing numbers, so I'll have to get back to you on that. I know it exists, somewhere, but I know I don't have it in my personal statsheets so that'd be a bit harder to get. The second one is easier. Here's a table with the five bigs in the league that foul the fewest times per 48 minutes.

Obviously, LeBron is first -- he's barely a big, and I'm not sure why my positional rankings counted him as one. Other than one name on this list, all of them are pretty expected -- Bargnani is notorious for never fouling, Durant has never fouled in his life, and Bonner is... well... Matt Bonner. The one name on this list that confuses me and will forever confuse me? ANDREW BYNUM. He had one of the 10 the lowest foul rates for a true center_ in the history of the NBA_ this season. I understand he's been a little lazier on defense, and I understand he's laid off his man a bit. But Bynum's ability to avoid drawing fouls despite playing a relatively physical game for a center is one of those things I will never, ever understand. Especially not last year where, again, he had one of the lowest foul-per-minute performances ever. EVER. It's ridiculous.

• • •

QUESTION #6: Is it just me, or does France have a really good chance to win gold this year, especially with USA and ESP hurting? from @sstewart1617

It's not just you. I think USA is still the favorite, but due to Spain's injuries, they might be second to France in terms of our greatest threat. There's a big x-factor for them, though -- if Tony Parker's eyesight is at all compromised or his game is off due to needing to wear goggles, etc... they're screwed. They more than most foreign teams absolutely depend on Tony to run their offense. I think he'll probably be fine, hence, I think they're our biggest threat. But yeah. USA is in a bit of trouble. I don't understand why Coach K and the Team USA brass aren't busting down the doors for Greg Monroe and Demarcus Cousins -- I thought Davis was a poor choice over the two of them to begin with, and given the absolute dearth of bigs on this team, I feel like they really need to shore up their rotation. There's still so many questions about this team's rotation, it's kind of shocking that they're still considered the favorites to win Gold. I mean, they are -- nobody's going to match CP3/LeBron/Durant in terms of pure talent. But otherwise, the team is older and in a bit of a tough spot. We're either going to need to play Durant or LeBron at center or play Tyson an insane (and impossible) minutes load. If I was a Knicks fan, I'd be pissed at the brass for putting Chandler in this kind of a position -- he's the Knicks' best player, and it looks like he's about to play way more minutes than any one man should have to in an offseason. Just some weird decisions from the brass.

• • •

QUESTION #7: If you had to manage the locker room of an NBA team, which would it be? (factor in: player personalities, coach, location, etc) from @TheWagOfMutombo

I wouldn't mind living in San Antonio. So... the Spurs. Pretty easily. Beyond the Spurs, I think I'd enjoy the Suns -- Alvin seems like a nice guy and that has always seemed like a locker room with a lot of cohesion. In terms of a locker room I absolutely positively would NOT want to manage... any team that has Dwight Howard. Or the Knicks. Would not want to manage either of those. Interesting question, though.

• • •

QUESTION #8: Among the final 6 candidates, who would you select for the final 3 on the US Olympic Team? from @soconnor76

For those readers who aren't familiar, here's the list of the final 6 candidates:

• James Harden
• Eric Gordon
• Anthony Davis
• Rudy Gay
• Andre Iguodala
• Blake Griffin

Honestly? I kind of hate this list. As I said before, unless we want to try playing Love at Center, Tyson Chandler is on pace to play an insane number of minutes in this year's Olympics. Blake will be fine, but he is not an all-world defensive big by any stretch of the imagination and he's never consistently played Center. Neither Cousins or Monroe adds a ton defensively to the team, but at least they're used to playing that role on the court. Hibbert would be an interesting choice too, but I seem to recall him saying he didn't want to play for Team USA a long time back. Anyway. Out of this list, I'd pick Gordon, Griffin, and Iguodala. In that order (IE, Gordon before Griffin before Iggy) -- while Gordon and Iguodala don't seem like obvious choices, they and Tyson Chandler made up the core of the 2010 team's stifling defense (ESPECIALLY Gordon, whose defense absolutely flourishes in the international game) and we're going to want a team that can keep leads without scoring when our big three hits the bench.

EDIT: Excellent point from @rscotham. Roy Hibbert already played for the Jamaican National Team. This makes him ineligible for the U.S. Olympic team, which is why he has no interest. He actually can't. Sorry, Roy.

• • •

QUESTION #9: Based on his rookie season, what's the best comparison you can draw for Kyrie Irving? from @AngeloCLE

This is always a fun one to answer. In terms of PER, Kyrie recorded the 6th best PER by a rookie guard in the history of the league -- the players above him include three Hall of Fame guys, Chris Paul, and the always-underrated Walter Davis. The only point guards above him were CP3 and Magic. In terms of players who shot as well as Kyrie did, there's a single candidate -- Stephen Curry, who's the only other rookie guard to ever shoot over 35% from three and 85% from the line while averaging > 4 assists and > 17 points. Kyrie only played 30 MPG, though -- his per 36 stats (22-4-6 on 47%-40%-87% shooting) have been matched or bettered... well... never. Even on a per-36 basis. If you cut down the points, you get a few point guards of note -- namely Billups, Nash, and Price. With a little bit of Manu thrown in for good measure.

All this leads me to this. What's the best comparison for one of the most efficient scoring point guard seasons of all time? If I absolutely had to pick a player comparison, it would be Mark Price at his prime. A little less talent around Kyrie, so the assists aren't quite as high. But as a rookie, Kyrie Irving was a more prolific scoring Mark Price with a bit less of the passing and a bit more of the rebounding. This should make Cleveland fans pretty happy, given that Mark Price is dreadfully underrated and -- in terms of peak production -- one of the 7 best point guards the league has ever seen. This should also make Cleveland fans pretty happy because, you know, KYRIE IRVING WAS A ROOKIE LAST SEASON.

... Man, I love Kyrie.

• • •

QUESTION #10: Assuming Nash deal goes as proposed, how do Nets/Knicks stack up against Miami? Expectation wise? Salary wise? Your thoughts? Also: These Nets/Knicks deals have to make Miami look like geniuses from a Salary/Skill ratio, right? from @netgregory

Whoooo boy. This is gonna be a big one. So, the deal he's referring to is the just-broken prospective Nash sign-and-trade between the Knicks and the Suns. The Suns would receive Toney Douglas and Iman Shumpert, while the Knicks would recieve Steve Nash on a 3-year $30 million dollar deal. Steve Nash is 38 years old -- the deal will take him to his 41st birthday. Which is crazy. But from a broader perspective, there are three main things to think about when you consider how New York's two teams match up with the reigning champions. They are as follows.

• Who's going to defend LeBron? In the case of the Knicks, the answer is complicated. Before Shumpert went out, there were some possessions where Shump cross-matched LeBron. If I remember right, he did OK. That option is gone if the Knicks succeed in landing Nash, but it's worth noting that it'd probably be gone anyway. Shump is coming off a deadly knee injury that's going to (most likely) linger for at least a season -- if we're thinking simply about 2013, Shump's absence probably won't hurt the club all that much. He was going to be absent for a while anyway. But the Knicks DO have Chandler, who can defend LeBron when he drives -- the Nets can put Gerald Wallace on LeBron individually to help make LeBron's spot-up shots a bit harder, but LeBron's forays to the rim will be absolutely impossible for the Nets to stop with a Teletovic/Lopez front line. I'd say that Chandler's presence at making his drives harder (thus forcing him into more long range shooting) would make the Knicks a better defensive team on LeBron than the Nets. But they're both going to be pretty helpless to stop him.

• Assuming LeBron and Wade stifle the team's two best scoring options, who's going to score? Again, both teams don't rate out particularly well, here. The Knicks will -- assuming Melo and Nash are having trouble scoring -- be reliant on Chandler and Stoudemire to create offense. If Deron and Johnson are being stifled, the Nets will rely on Brook Lopez and Wallace to create for themselves. One thing that Sebastian Pruiti pointed out the other day -- and it's a fantastic point -- is that Teletovic has a somewhat slow release on his shot. Because of that, defenders in the NBA are most likely going to be able to double off of him and pressure Lopez. The addition of Johnson and Wallace will help against most teams, and it will make their offense significantly better -- but against the Heat, where they have two lockdown defenders that can switch onto JJ and Deron to a lot of success, that may leave Teletovic's man free to help onto Lopez off Teletovic knowing that his release is slow enough for them to get back into position and still cover his shot. So against Miami, I'd think Lopez will see about as many doubles as he has the last few years. Which means massive inefficiency from a scoring standpoint. At least for next year, I think the Nash-Chandler connection would help the Knicks come out on top in this matchup relative to the Nets. Barely, though. And if Crash has a bounce-back year, the Nets are going to be better at this. (Both will be pretty bad though.)

• Who wins the board battle? Miami was not a great rebounding team last year, and one of the few places they found themselves below-average was as an offensive rebounding team. Teams with top rebounding centers tended to give the Heat more trouble than they perhaps expected, including the Magic, the Celtics, and the Lakers. In the case of the Nets, they have superior rebounders at every non-guard position -- Deron, Johnson, and Wallace are all fantastic rebounders for their size. Lopez and Teletovic, though? Lopez is one of the worst rebounding centers in the league, and Teletovic was only able to average about 6 boards per 36 minutes in the Euroleague -- that's not a good sign. Chandler is a great rebounding center, but Amare is relatively poor and without Fields the Knicks are probably going to be sporting below-average rebounding players in three of their five positions. Because of the fact that I could see Chandler outrebounding Lopez and Teletovic BY HIMSELF, I'll give it to the Knicks -- but don't be surprised if the superior guard/forward rebounding from the Nets makes them a better rebounding team.

So, in sum, I'd say the Knicks match up slightly better against Miami. But only slightly -- these are all close between the Nets and the Knicks, and they're also all pretty atrocious matchups for both clubs. The Heat don't just outclass both these teams from a talent standpoint, they also match up pretty damn well with both of them. Which leads me to the next question from this set -- salaries and expectations. The Heat are in a really bad salary position two years from now -- it's very likely that both LeBron and Bosh will exercise their early termination options on their contracts and get the last max 4-5 year deal they'll get in their careers. Which means that if the Heat want to get better, they really need to hope they can attract players this offseason and next offseason -- two offseasons from now, even if they resign both LeBron and Bosh, resigning them will make them ineligible for most of the useful exceptions.

The Knicks and the Nets, though? They're in a worse spot. Neither team will have any options whatsoever to really remake their roster in an intelligent way. The weaknesses they show in the next two seasons will be almost impossible to allay, and that's what makes their position especially poor. Neither of these teams, as constructed, can really compete for a title. They're essentially in the same position as the 2009-2012 Atlanta Hawks. Their ceiling is a somewhat entertaining team to be made second-round fodder by Indiana, Miami, or Chicago. That's it. That's their ceiling. And they've put together a roster with absolutely no flexibility or avenues for improvement. They basically just need to hope every single man on the roster makes a quantum leap while their coaches suddenly become the next coming of Popovich. Both of these teams should be entertaining. The Knicks will be a Nash-led offense with a Chandler-backed defense, and that should be good for 4-6 in the east. The Nets have a chance to be one of the best offenses in the league, although their defense will most likely be bottom-10 -- so they'll be 5-8 seed in the east. But do they get better? Do they compete for a title? Not really. And while I eagerly await watching these teams next year, I wonder if mortgaging your future like that is really a good idea on their part.

I don't think so. But you're welcome to disagree.

• • •

QUESTION #11: How awesome would a Kyrie/Harden backcourt be? How much should the Cavs give up to try and get him? from @sstewart1617

It'd be pretty awesome. With Kyrie, Harden could play to his strengths a lot more -- as a cutter, as a spot-up three man, and as a general pressure-salvo to keep the defense honest on the team's star. I've been saying for a while that the Cavs should be trying really hard to trade for Harden. Essentially everything but Kyrie should be on the table -- as much as I love Varejao, he's essentially the perfect trade piece for a deal like this, because he's an underpaid-relative-to-his-production top-6 center with the ability to play PF or C depending on the matchup. He's exactly what the Thunder need. A package of something like Waiters+Varejao+Gee+Thompson for Harden would be a lot to give up for the Cavs, but it's probably what the Thunder would want to make the deal happen. Especially if it happens post-extension. Still. I think the Cavs should have Presti on speed-dial -- a Kyrie/Harden backcourt would be immediately the best backcourt in the league, and if you can manage to keep a semblance of the Cavs' front line, that's a top 4 team in the East with the potential to get even better.

• • •

QUESTION #12: Are offenses actually more efficient when they feature a "true" starting point guard instead of a score-first point guard? from Tim Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell

Tim sent in a bevy of great questions, which will make up our next three. This is the first of them, and it raises a good point. Many commentators get a tad salty when discussing so-called "score-first" point guards -- the conventional wisdom, as most know, is that offenses get significantly better when you're using a "true" or "pure" point guard that defers more than he scores. At least, that's the conventional wisdom. Does it still hold true? To answer this, I'm going to look at the last two years of offenses.

I will name off the 5 "purest" starting point guards in the league in that year according to PPR -- Pure Point Rating, a statistic that measures how pure a point guard is from a passing/turnover perspective -- and how their offense ranked in the league that year. This doesn't necessarily differentiate a scoring point guard from a passing point guard, but in general, the more possessions you use on offense the higher your turnovers are going to be. Thus, this is a decent pastiche for a short back-of-the-envelope analysis. Let's get the table together.

The answer? Not really. Conventional wisdom seems pretty incorrect, here -- in 2011, the offenses helmed by the top five "purest" point guards actually did worse than the rest of the league. In 2012, they did better on average, but that's only because Tony Parker was considered one of the five purest point guards that year due to a dearth of pure point guards -- most would consider tony a scoring point, and if you take the Spurs #1 ranked offense out of that fivesome, once again do the "pure point offenses" lose out to the field. So to answer your question? No. Offenses aren't more efficient when they feature a "true" starting point guard. At least not recently.

• • •

QUESTION #13: How much has Manu Ginobili declined in the last 3 seasons? from Tim Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell

This is pretty easy -- not much at all. Last season, Manu put in one of the most efficient seasons of his career -- he played limited minutes due to the injury woes, but put up per-36 averages of 20-5-7 on percentages close to the god-tier 50-40-90 mark (53-41-87). The season before, Manu played more minutes than he'd ever played before and averaged a per-36 mark of... wait for it... 21-4-6. And the season before that, when he was up for a new contract? Manu put up a per-36 mark of (stop me if you've heard this before)... 21-5-6. Manu's minutes have been fluctuating wildly these last few years as Pop tries to find the best mix between too much and too little, but one thing is certain. There's been no indication of a dropoff or a decline so far, despite the injuries. He's been playing above his career averages and playing his hardest. As he does. Chances are high he can put together at least one or two more seasons where he produces at a best-in-class level for his position, albeit in limited minutes.

• • •

QUESTION #14: Wouldn't the Lakers be better off to trade Kobe Bryant and keep both Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum? from Tim Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell

Sort of a sacrilegious question, but I'll bite. It really depends on the package. While Pau/Bynum is a great big-man pairing, Pau is playing slightly out of position as the big forward and might be better suited to play center going forward. But if a Kobe trade would theoretically bring in a few decent wings, a solid point guard, and a backup big man that can eat some of Pau's minutes? This sort of a trade would probably bring more value to the Lakers in the long run, especially considering that Kobe HAS shown signs of decline these last two years (unlike, funny enough, Manu -- Manu's older than Kobe, but his minutes have been managed better by Pop than by Phil/Brown/Kobe himself, and as a result, he's stayed significantly more efficient than Kobe).

It's unlikely Kobe (or anyone) has a "bounce back" season after the age of 30, so if the Lakers could move him for a big package of young prospects and solid guys, it's probable they'd win the deal. Problem is, Kobe has a no-trade clause and a huge trade kicker (if I remember right). So... no, that wouldn't happen. Even if they could get Kobe to agree to a trade, Kobe wouldn't let them do it if they were leaving another team's cupboard bare. So it really, really isn't going to happen. And even a Pau trade is rather difficult -- Pau is a 31-year-old that's declined quite a bit the last few years, and he has a massive trade kicker that makes him really hard to move. But if the Lakers really want to improve to a title-contending level, that's probably what they're going to need to do.

• • •

QUESTION #15: I did a rough statistical analysis of Kawhi Leonard's rookie season and his actual & per36 #s were very similar to Danny Granger's rookie year, which surprised me a bit. Do you think Granger's production since then is a good expectation for Kawhi going forward? from @ChattJacket20

This is an interesting question. I've thought pretty long and hard about what to expect from Kawhi going forward, and my conclusion was relatively similar -- going forward, I think it's reasonable for Spurs fans to expect Kawhi to eventually evolve into a player something in-between Danny Granger and Gerald Wallace on the offensive end. If he focuses more on developing his offensive creation game and his scoring, he could be a 20 PPG type player -- if he focuses more on developing within the team concept and focusing on his rebounding, he could develop into a Gerald Wallace type. On defense, he'll almost certainly be superior to Danny Granger, and comparable to Crash -- the question is what he choses to focus on out of the scoring/tertiary stat dimension. I think Granger's a good comparable, though it's sort of like one out of a series of 3 or 4 possibilities.

• • •

QUESTION #16: Dwight said he didn't want to play second fiddle to Kobe. If he does get traded to the Nets... is he the 2nd banana or the 3rd banana? from @afa_moritz

Depends on how willing Joe Johnson is to defer. Johnson has been the first option on every team he's been on since Phoenix, and he left Phoenix partly because he wanted to be "that guy." The Hawks rather explicitly showed that he's not. If the Nets were to most efficiently use their pieces, I'd probably have them playing inside-out with Deron playing a sort of high-power Hedo Turkoglu role and Joe Johnson spotting up to play the Rashard role on offense -- with that kind of a setup, they could probably be one of the 4 or 5 best offenses in the league, and Dwight could carry them to becoming a top 10 defensive team. More likely, though, the ball would stay in Deron's hands far too much, Joe Johnson would be their secondary option, and Dwight would be playing off-ball in almost every situation despite being one of the most dominant post options in the league.

I don't think Avery Johnson is a good enough tactician to put together a 2009 Magic-esque offense, even with pieces like that -- more likely see him going the Mike Woodson or Paul Westphal route of scarcely planned offenses that mostly just coast on the talent of their perimeter players. As you might've noticed, I think Dwight might be a bit wasted under Avery. Especially with Joe. We'd have to see, and it's possible the Nets hire a few offensive guys who can figure out a scheme and build a Stan Van Gundy-style offense. But I have a sinking feeling the Nets would be a pretty awful place for Dwight to land, at least in terms of how that team as composed would utilize him. I could be wrong, though. Also, just to point out -- yes, Dwight wants to be the 1st option. If he leaves the Magic, it's unlikely to happen.

• • •

QUESTION #17: How will discovery of the Higgs Boson change the way basketball is played? from @deimachy

For a few years, it won't. But the Spurs will pick it up in a stash pick, and in 5 years, it'll come over from Europe and wreck havoc on the game. Whoops, sorry, just spoiled the end of the next lockout. I think the spoiler alerts mean it's time to wrap this up. Thanks for the great questions, ladies and gents. We'll do this again in a month or two, when the season's a bit closer. Keep chill.

• • •

So, as with last time, there are a few ways to submit questions. First, you could tweet me at @docrostov. Second, you could simply post them on twitter with the hashtag #gothicginobili. Third, you could leave a question in the comments. I'll be answering questions until I decide to make dinner. So ask away, friends.

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